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FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

colatkinson.site

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Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#191

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #162
pjmlp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will keep going on, until FOSS community accepts that beyond university projects, someone pumping up their CVs, having a company sponsorship, or being able to pimp it up with some kind of subscription/consulting, there is little to no money to be made and everyone has bills to pay.

That said, the FOSS community has created bigger companies and made bigger money than some of your favourite commercial projects (proprietary compilers, etc).

Like LLVM, which everyone is using to replace GCC, so that they are able to profit without contribution thanks MIT?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#192

Post by adrianN »

tinus_hn wrote: post #159
adrianN wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbidding users from doing dangerous stuff with the machines they own is not good imho.

But is it allowed for users to choose a machine that forbids this?

That's a difficult question because it might limit supply of open machines for users who want the freedom to hack their own stuff. I think it's okay to offer computers that are basically Facebook appliances, but there should always be a toggle somewhere that allows people who know what they're doing to do whatever they please.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#193

Post by ynx »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #168
huhtenberg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know exactly what you mean, but this is incorrect. CC is not "closed source". CC makes a license incompatible with the OSI definition of "open source", which is one of the interpretations of the term. There's a persistent confusion over the difference between OSI's definition and the casual understanding of it. To the laymen, if you can _see_ the source, then it's an _open_ source. And if you can _use_ and _change_…

No, that is completely wrong. If you can _see_ the source, then it is _shared_ source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative ). If you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _open_ source. Are you going to tell me next that "free speech" means not paying for the radio? And that everything else is just one interpretation of the term? Or that freeware and free software are interchangeable terms? CC is…

I think the point is that it's not OSI open source, rather than not "open source".

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#194

Post by zozbot234 »

ynx wrote: post #193
diffeomorphism wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is completely wrong. If you can _see_ the source, then it is _shared_ source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative ). If you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _open_ source. Are you going to tell me next that "free speech" means not paying for the radio? And that everything else is just one interpretation of the term? Or that freeware and free software are interchangeable terms? CC is…

I think the point is that it's not OSI open source , rather than not "open source".

> I think the point is that it's not OSI open source

Yup, and the OS in OSI stand for, guess what, "open source".

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#195

Post by __d »

DagAgren wrote: post #183
roenxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far. Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower. Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then every…

I'm not sure the argument "FOSS has done fine so far" is that convincing when you then lay out many of the places where FOSS has been failing miserably.

Not to forget the many, many places where it has and is succeeding happily.

Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.

Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#196

Post by mr__y »

pjc50 wrote: post #111
pjmlp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will keep going on, until FOSS community accepts that beyond university projects, someone pumping up their CVs, having a company sponsorship, or being able to pimp it up with some kind of subscription/consulting, there is little to no money to be made and everyone has bills to pay.

I think the developers generally understand that. No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money. It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.

>No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money

well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#197

Post by hombre_fatal »

roenxi wrote: post #151
DagAgren wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But every person, sensible or not, has bills to pay. When you say "no sensible person goes into FOSS for the money" you are saying "most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project", and you really can't claim that is in any way good for FOSS.

That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far. Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower. Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then every…

> That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.

Compared to what knowledge of how good it could be if we had a more sustainable model than hoping someone has the charity or hobby to work on something we need for free?

This reminds me of when gamers assert how game modding has done fine so far limited to just labors of love and weekend hobbyism. Though I'm sure gamers are more coming from an angle of not wanting to pay for anything, we can only imagine the gaming mods we'd have if we had more of a culture around allowing people to work full-time on things we enjoy instead of only waiting for the few hobbyists with the masochism or compulsion to do it.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#198

Post by BurningCycles »

pjmlp wrote: post #175
BurningCycles wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender, Krita are notable FOSS projects being sustainable through donations. I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's not impossible.

Blender was a commercial product and has some big studios doing those donations, as far as I remember. And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.

>Blender was a commercial product

18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations

>and has some big studios doing those donations

These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.

>And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.

Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#199

Post by pmjordan »

atq2119 wrote: post #63
mike_d wrote: post #13

It is buried in the footnotes of the post, but the ultimate reason behind going closed source is that Google built their enterprise GDrive syncing client for mac off a fork of osxfuse. The original author of osxfuse feels entitled to some compensation for that and is doing his damnedest to make it happen.

That's why I prefer the GPL and variants for personal projects that I don't intend to profit off monetarily. It's a conscious choice that I do want compensation, and I don't want to work for free"--but said compensation should be in code and not necessarily in money. It's why contributing to a BSD-licensed project as a hobby can feel a bit icky, and doing the same on a GPL-licensed project doesn't.

In addition to the sensible question of whether Google even would need to link against any GPL code raised by other commenters, there's also the question of whether the GPL would even make any sense for a kext, considering the kext needs to include Apple's header files (largely APSL-licensed) and link against macOS's kernel. (binary-only proprietary fork of the open source xnu source dump)

(I've licensed my own FOSS kext code as LGPL - either way, the copyleft aspect wouldn't affect any userland code using the kext as it'd be running in a different process. And AGPL doesn't change anything in this context either as far as I'm aware as its additional provisions are only relevant for code running on systems not under the user's control, and again if you're not linking against it, your code isn't a derived work.)

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#200

Post by indigochill »

kakwa_ wrote: post #122
hizanberg wrote: post #23

Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]: > I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE w…

Well, in this specific case, I think the best outcome would be for Apple to merge the module in the MAC OSX kernel so it's there by default, FUSE is kind of a de-facto standard and is clearly a widely useful piece of code. But, big picture, yes a lot of OSS projects have the same issue. Funding is clearly one aspect, but another aspect is also to work on having less "single person projects" (and I'm not talking about…

Adding someone into a solo project introduces social overhead. That's not necessarily a bad thing and can even be a very good thing (I much prefer making music with other people and seeing how our influences mix as opposed to making music solo). But there is a cost/risk there which I could certainly see some solo developers just not being interested in taking on.

On the other hand, since this is OSS, if an organization does need N>1 badly enough, then they can commit their own resources to it, forking if necessary.

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